Photo Contest: The Ever-Present V

Five is an important number. Assuming nothing has gone amuck in our development or our usage of cutlery, we each boast five digits on both our hands and both our feet. Most of us have five senses. Most miraculously, any number multiplied by five and then divided by five gives you the same number you started with and yields no remainder.

The Babalonians considered the Pentagram to refer to the five directions (forward, backward, left, right, and up – they had no appetite for down, apparently) and these represented their five known planets. For the Greeks, or more specifically the Pythagoreans, it represented mathematical perfection and – when turned upside down with two legs pointing up, it represented the womb wherein the cosmos were born. Ancient Chinese teachings (Wu Xing) tell of the five basic elements: water, tree (wood), fire, earth, and metal. The Hebrew Torah refers to five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Christianity uses the pentagram to identify the five senses; the Old Testament considers five to be the number of divine perfection.

Five is all over the place in Hinduism; the figure of Anjaneya has five faces, the great Yogi Sri Vinayaka transcended the five senses. The god Vishnu is identified by the five-pointed star and has five aspects of himself. There are five qualities of Supreme Being: truth (satyam), knowledge (jnanam), infinity (anantam), bliss (anandam) and purity (amalatvam). There are five means to know, do, and experience. There are five sacred fires, types of devotion, types of worship. The calendar is based on five parts. They have five times as many holidays as we do.

Then we have the occult, satanism, and just about every made-up, imagined, or real secret society. We don’t do much “Math” or “Research” around these parts, but five also plays an important part in the golden ratio, which – I’m given to understand – is what makes stuff stop sucking.

All these groups missed the fundamental importance of five; the Velominati is perhaps the first community to discover its true secret. It was the Romans who cobbled together the most diabolical numbering system know to humanity, but they stumbled upon a hidden secret when they chose to represent the sacred number 5 as a V. The V is what surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds us together. The V is the everywhere around us, waiting for the initiated to absorb it, and convert it into force for strength, change, personal development, and tearing the legs off our riding mates.

The V is everywhere. In road signs, in the clouds, in paintings, in the spreading of water from our wheels as we ride in Rule #9 conditions. It is in our quads and our calves. It is in the angles of our frames. We hereby open the second Velominati photo contest: post your photo of the V revealing itself in daily life. Photos will be judged for content as well as composition. The winner will be awarded an as-yet unreleased cotton Velominati cycling cap. Submit your photos by November 1 in order to be considered. The photos have to be your own, or belong to a person who has given you permission to use the photo for this purpose.

Update:

Please don’t name your photo “The V” as it will bugger up the code until I get a chance to fix that bug. Also, don’t believe your preview if you are copy-pasting photos on iPads or elsewhere; it will not work after you push “submit post”.

About frank

A lifelong Velominatus, the history and culture within cycling fascinates Frank and, if given even the vaguest of excuses, will discuss it to exhuastion. A devoted cycling aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it.